Sic: Deletions and Emendationsan erasure of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams2014-07-25T16:18:49Zhttp://abrahamavnisan.com/?feed=atomWordPressanowitzhttp://abrahamavnisan.com/?p=1002011-09-15T05:02:56Z2011-02-02T18:13:08ZWritten and made in the visual-poetic tradition of Jen Bervin and Tom Phillips, Sic: Deletions and Emendations is a conceptual artist’s book. In between genres and disciplines, Sic is a collection of three different types of “found” documents: some sixty partially erased pages of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, unsigned letters sent from a never-named European city, and a handful of photographic portraits. Presumably, the contents of Sic once belonged to a character named K, the obsessive effacer of Freud’s book and the recipient of the letters and photographs carefully tucked away among its pages.

The constellation of Sic’s textual layers is open-ended: to make sense of it, the reader is invited to step into Freud’s shoes and interpret the texts and images for herself. Sic is at once a novelistic love story examining the un-narrated relationship between K and the sender of the letters and photographs; a collection of lyric poems of increasing formal experimentation in which the act of reading itself must be relearned, if not reinvented; a work of theoretical-philosophical intervention, in which Freud’s hermeneutic methodology is turned on itself with unexpected and unstable results; and a work of visual art—an erasure in which the page is unevenly effaced, leaving behind a ghosted, palimpsestic field that the intact text floats in and through, as if unaware of the things it is being compelled to say.

]]>0anowitzhttp://abrahamavnisan.com/?p=12013-08-29T13:54:09Z2011-01-31T19:22:45ZAbraham Avnisan is a poet and artist exploring the materiality of language through computer programming and digital media. His work has been published and exhibited in the Poetry Project Newsletter, Drunken Boat, Rain Taxi, Centotto Gallery, the Figment Arts Festival on Governor’s Island in New York City, and others. He holds an M.F.A. in poetry from Brooklyn College and is currently an M.F.A. candidate in the Art and Technology Studies Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.